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It's a pleasure to write about my favorite Techdirt posts of the week. I have been a longtime fan of Techdirt and can attest that the small tech literate crowd (yes it exists) on Capitol Hill are also avid readers. I was the Capitol Hill staffer who worked for House...

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It's another week where one comment stood out way above the others in the voting for "most insightful." An Anonymous Coward absolutely dominated the "insightful" voting with this response to the story about the Justice Department's ridiculous arguments trying to block legitimate users from getting their content back from the...

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Taking the top spot in "insightful" comment voting was Bengie, responding to big broadband players in Kansas City demanding a "level playing field" against Google's fiber offering. Bengie points out what a real "level playing field" might look like: AT&T/TW/Comcast/etc have gotten about 1.2tril in grants and tax-breaks over the...

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To Silvie van Etten: Thank you for your letter on November 23rd, 2012, (which we have reposted below in its entirety, minus your contact info) in which you mistakenly suggest that Techdirt has infringed the copyrights of your company, Human Synergistics, via its post from October 5th, 2012, entitled Copyright...

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We've pointed out that the unconstitutional FISA Amendments Act (along with its secret interpretation), look likely to get renewed before the end of the year. Senator Wyden is willing to drop his hold, but if he doesn't get certain amendments in, he wants to limit the length of the extension...

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Techdirt has been reporting on a steady stream of bad tech ideas coming out of Russia, including content monitoring, banning children from using WiFi, anti-piracy laws requiring takedowns in 24 hours and -- of course -- site blocking. But such blacklists are too permissive for some Russians: over on Google+,...

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The New York Times is supporting the Associated Press in a controversial copyright case against Meltwater, a service that monitors the news and reproduces headlines and story summaries for its clients. The case pits major media outlets who invest in news against technology advocates who fear the case will suppress...

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As we learned (though were hardly surprised by) this week, the MPAA doesn't take kindly to the suggestion that it should have to consider fair use when sending DMCA notices. The irony of this was not lost on anyone, and indeed both of our most insightful comments of the...

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Today at 1pm PT (4pm ET), we'll be doing a live streaming interview with Cole Stryker, the author of Hacking the Future: Privacy, Identity, and Anonymity on the Web. We've run a couple of excerpts from the book -- one about why anonymity matters, that many of you agreed with,...

betabeat.com

(Photo: Sister Sin) A few months ago, Betabeat investigated the seedy practice of buying Facebook likes. Fledgling companies and wannabe stars frequently pad their profiles with fake fans in order to boost their cred and give themselves something called “social proof,” the illusion that others have vetted and recommended them....

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As we announced a few weeks ago, the July Techdirt Book Club book is Year Zero written by Rob Reid and which comes out today, published by Random House. Rob will be joining us in a few weeks to talk about writing a comic sci-fi novel about the mess that...

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As Techdirt has reported over the last year, the Indian government is becoming increasingly keen on using cheaper, generic versions of important drugs to treat diseases, rather than paying Western-level prices its people can ill afford. Intellectual Property Watch reports on another instance of the Indian authorities easing the way...

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We recently wrote about Techdirt turning 15. A few weeks later, without anyone (including us) noticing, we also published our 50,000th post. Every day I'm in awe of the community here and the conversations and discussions that we've had. In the back of my head, it still feels like the...

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Techdirt has been following open textbooks for some time now, and 2012 looks to be a bumper year for them. Here, for example, is a major initiative in the US: California college students hit with tuition increases in recent years will get a little financial help after Gov. Jerry Brown...

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It's time to announce the latest Techdirt Book Club book: Cory Doctorow's excellent new book Pirate Cinema. Many of you may have picked it up in the recent Humble Ebook Bundle that it was a part of. If not, you can, as always download it from Cory's site. Of course,...

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Over the past few weeks we've been running this little experiment with Darrell West of the Governance Studies program of the Brookings Institution to crowdsource ideas, feedback and insights into how the federal government can go about promoting an innovation economy. I wanted to use this Labor Day "off-day" to...

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Last week, Techdirt reported on the news that falling numbers of P2P users are being trumpeted as a victory for HADOPI's "three strikes" approach in France, but that it is a hollow victory, since sales of recorded music are still dropping in that country. The French site Numerama points out...

techcrunch.com

A recent UN report from the United Nations Counter-Terrorism Implementation Task Force reads like a primer on Internet control and censorship. Entitled “Use Of The Internet For Terrorist Purposes,” the document, which discusses the dangers of “open Wi-Fi” and suggests ISPs maintain retention standards, focuses on the possibility of “terrorists”...

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If you're like me, you may have thought that France was simply a repository for cheese-eating surrender-monkeys. It turns out that's not true. They also have a wonderful court system that doesn't want to understand the digital world. That same French court system also managed to make a complete mockery...

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As of this writing, my Dimeword campaign to fund public domain literature has more than doubled its funding goal and is still rising. 10 hours from the publishing of this article, the Dimeword campaign will end and I can finally start writing 100 stories for the public domain. Boat drinks!...

techcrunch.com

Someone in DC thought they had snuffed out an official Republican report on radical intellectual property reform by convincing the authoring agency to erase the document from the Internet and fire the staffer charged with writing it. The shadowy politicking backfired. The young fall-boy, Derek Khanna, instantly became a front-page...

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Cloud computing has been presented as the new economic weapon for bringing economic prosperity to Europe, if you believe the new cloud computing strategy from the European Commission. An additional € 957 billion ($1,236 billion) is expected to be earned in the EU by 2020, along with an additional 3.8...

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One of the slogans of the copyright industries is that you can't make money from giving things away. Unfortunately for them, examples just keep coming up showing that's simply not true. Techdirt wrote about the interesting case of the London Evening Standard back in 2009, shortly after its new owner...

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There's a lot of discussion here at Techdirt about filesharing. Much of the discussion focuses on various legacy industries and their efforts to fight infringement, as well as their continued cultivation of artificial scarcity, which often sends potential customers towards unapproved sources. Various artists have also weighed in on the...

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Techdirt often writes about the benefits of openness and sharing. One area that is increasingly coming to the fore is open data -- for example, for some time both the US and UK have had major projects aimed at opening up the stores of data held by their respective governments,...

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Techdirt has published several posts recently about the growing anger among scholars over the way their work is exploited by academic publishers. But there's another angle to the story, that of the academic institutions who have to pay for the journals needed by their professors and students. Via a number...

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Hey folks. Mike is at Innovate/Activate this weekend, so I'm bringing you the roundup of funniest and most insightful comments. No record-busters this week, but lots of high scores nevertheless. The insight trophy goes to RD for a challenge to copyright maximalists that has so far gone unanswered. When we...

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Technology patent trolling seems to have become a regular pasttime — something that is influenced proprtionally with lucrative potential of a patent, and which the long-flawed approval process at the USPTO (U.S. Patent & Trademark Office) abets in the first place. Now there’s another questionable patent lawsuit, this one involving...

mashable.com

File under: “Extremely Creepy” — BoingBoing reports that a recent case filing in Robbins vs. Lower Merion School District, a Pennsylvania school, is a class action suit on behalf of students with school-issued laptops whose webcams have been used to watch the students and their families at home.It was...

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We recently posted what I thought was an interesting essay by musician Erin McKeown on her reaction to seeing someone copy a song of hers, and have that other song become a "hit." We thought it was an interesting and nuanced exploration of some of the challenges of being a...